Joel Beinin draws the ire of FrontPageMag (again)

Stanford University history professor Joel Beinin made the latest in a series of appearances on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) Palo Alto cable television program “Other Voices” on November 2, 2010. The subject of the show was “Israel-Palestine: A New Protest Generation” and, as before, it provided a platform for Beinin’s anti-Israel animus.

The show began with a brief discussion of what Beinin delightedly called the “overall decline” of the United States, evidenced by the “failure even at the crude military level in both Iraq and Afghanistan” and the resulting inability to employ the military “as an instrument of policy.”

Following these inflammatory claims, the interview turned to its focus: the recent phenomenon of young, Jewish Israelis—most of whom belong to a group called “Anarchists Against the Wall”—participating in Palestinian rallies against the “illegal settlements” and the West Bank security barrier. As Beinin put it, these Israelis stand “shoulder to shoulder with Palestinians” with the goal of preventing “some of the violence that the army might direct against them.”

Beinin pointed out that a culture has emerged in which Palestinians are willing to deem Israelis “one of us” if rubber bullets or other Israeli military actions cause them to suffer debilitating injuries during rallies. He described a recent tour of the WestBank led by an Israeli who had “lost sight in his left eye” at one of these rallies and, as a result, was considered a hero by the Palestinians. “I might as well have been going around with Yasser Arafat,” Beinin exclaimed. This Israeli, he boasted, was one of the leaders of what he called the “successful divestment [from Israel] campaign at Hampshire College” in 2009. In fact, it was not a successful divestment campaign, as was widely acknowledged at the time....